The Emergence and Evolution of Religion

Reviews / Votes

"Turner et al.'s account is easily the best of those that attempt to place religion in the context of biological evolution. The book's grounding in the physiological literature, especially on the brain organs and connections involved in emotion, memory, gesture, and language, combined with a mastery of the details of hominid evolution, makes for an impressive statement. Further combined with Turner's comprehensive theory of the elements of human social interaction and institutions, this is a strong statement not just of how human evolution happened, but also the problems that had to be surmounted."
Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania, USA

"This book is bold in attributing to religion a central role in human biological and social evolution. By considering the details of violent processes of selection and the agency of political and religious elites, religion is shown to be both a cause and a tool of social evolution."
Joerg Ruepke, Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt, Germany

"At a time when social scientific interest in social evolution and religion has been renewed, this book stands out in its careful, adept, and insightful ability to eschew overly simple biological or psychological explanations for religiosity or the growth of complex religious institutions. Ultimately, its strength rests on two key contributions. First, the exhaustive and provocative examination of primate and human evolution, the biological roots of religiosity, and, importantly, the consequences religiosity had on our evolution. Second, the delineation of three types of sociocultural selection - Spencerian, Durkheim, and Marxian - that offer compelling evidence for evolution beyond our genes and provide powerful theoretical explanations for a wider range of historical developments including politics, economics, and law."
Seth Abrutyn, University of British Columbia, Canada

"The authors present a novel synthesis of evolutionary and sociological theory, backed by authoritative historical evidence from a variety of fields. This is an important book for scholars interested in the evolution and institutionalization of religion. It takes a very different approach from the more cognitive approach of Robert Bellah, and, as such, creates a useful tension between two fruitful schools of theory and research in this area."
Merlin Donald, Professor Emeritus, Queen's University, Canada, and author of Origins of the Modern Mind

The Emergence and Evolution of Religion by Turner, Maryanski, Petersen, and Geertz promises a lot at the outset of the book, and, quite remarkably, by its end, it delivers everything it promised. I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in the evolutionary origins of all three aspects of religion, and believe that it will provide the sources and foundations of countless Ph.D. dissertations in the near future.
Satoshi Kanazawa, London School of Economics and Political Science, Contemporary Sociology Turner et al.'s account is easily the best of those that attempts to place religion in the context of biological evolution. The books' grounding in the physiological literature, especially on the brain organs and connections involved in emotion, memory, gesture, and language, combined with a mastery of the details of hominid, evolution, makes for an impressive statement. Further combined with Turner's comprehensive theory of the elements of human social interaction and institutions, this is a strong statement not just of how human evolution happened but what problems had to be surmounted.

--Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania